mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Recipe: mushroom madness soup/pate/mousse

As you can see from the title, I don't know whether to call this concoction a soup, a pate, a mousse, or what. But whatever you call it, it was a very successful experiment--great mouthfeel, great nutrition, naturally low in calories, and damned delicious. Not the prettiest looking stuff in the world, but I'm sure it could be tarted up for a dinner party (if you don't wind up inhaling it all first).

Ingredients:

• A couple pounds of assorted fresh mushrooms, sliced, stems included: it's actually okay if these are just plain ol' supermarket white mushrooms--I had a huge package of same which I bought on special--but creminis or other mild-flavored shrooms would be good too. I wouldn't recommend portobellos because I find they can get umpleasantly strong-flavored--especially because you're also going to add:
• About two ounces of dried gourmet mushrooms. I happened to use a packet of mixed European shrooms from Trader Joe's, but I bet dried shiitakes would also be great.
• One large onion, chopped
• A few cloves garlic, minced
• Olive oil, 1 Tblsp
• Non-stick cooking spray, as needed
• Red wine vinegar, approx 1 Tblsp.
• Dried tarragon, 1 scant tsp.
• 1 cup stock (chicken, beef, or vegetable)
• Salt and fresh-ground black pepper, to taste.
• Optional: enoki mushrooms, separated, for garnishing

Special equipment: a blender

Method:

1. Set the dried mushrooms to soak for at least 30 minutes or until soft in about a cup of hot water.
2. In a large soup pot, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat; add the sliced fresh mushrooms, season lightly with salt and pepper, and allow them to sweat down until they have shrunk down, gotten very tender, and exuded a bunch of liquid.
3. Meanwhile, sweat the onions and garlic (seasoned lightly w/more S&P) separately in a large saute pan sprayed with cooking spray over moderate heat.
4. When the dried mushrooms are properly reconstituted, remove them from their soaking liquid and wring them out, making sure to catch all the exuded liquid and reserve it along with the soaking liquid. Chop the dried shrooms finely.
5. When the onions are tender, or even taken on a little color, add them to the mushrooms, along with the tarragon, vinegar, dried mushrooms, their (strained) soaking liquid, and the stock. Simmer for about 20 minutes or so to combine flavors, correcting seasoning as needed.
6. Run the mushroom mixture by batches in the blender until pretty well pureed. You may leave some of the shroom mixture un-pureed for texture. The puree will be nice and fluffy/creamy without any need to add any dairy product.
7. Serve hot in bowls, optionally garnished with a bunch of shredded enoki. Alternately, you can chill this stuff and serve it as a dip/spread.

Some variations I haven't tried yet, but which I think would really work great:

• Vary the types of mushrooms used--the only limit here is your imagination!
• Instead of red wine vinegar, try other vinegars (I think a balsamico or sherry vinegar would be fabulous), or a shot of wine or sherry.
• Vary the garnishes: maybe a little sour cream or lowfat yogurt; or some snipped chives or other herbage.
• Use different herbs and spices than the tarragon; again the only limit here is your imagination.
• If you do want a cream-of-shroom soup with actual dairy, by all means go for it. I think I would add it during step #5 above so it has a chance to absorb all the flavors before being pureed together with everything else.

Weekly weigh-in--plus: feeding a crowd healthily

Well, I could whine about the heat some more, and how it's still making it a royal pain to cook and exercise. But then you'd be fully justified in whining at me for complaining about a fact of life in Southern California. So let's just skip all that and get to this week's numbers:

• Today's weight: 272.0 lb
• Change since last week: -3.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 62 lb

You'll notice that I breezed right through the big six-oh milestone without so much as a blink of an eye. Don't think for a minute, though, that I'm taking that for granted--on the contrary, I'm especially glad of my continued progress given that I've been eating out rather more often than usual this past week. I always try to conform to the almighty food plan as much as possible even when in restaurants, but there's no denying that it's a good bit more challenging than when I'm at home and have total control over recipe content and portion size. So--nice to get the positive feedback that I'm still right on track (despite the weather--whine whine whine giggle).

Meanwhile, one of those eating-out experiences still involved my own cooking. I have volunteered to supply the eats for the after-services coffee hour at my church one service a month, and my first go at it was this past Sunday. The woman in charge of the Church kitchen has been on a one-person war for the past year to stamp out the stale doughnuts and cookies repasts of the past, and I was more than happy to join her in this endeavor--especially since it allowed me to sneak in some healthy foods as well. What I presented last Sunday:

• Homemade hummus -- so simple, and so good! Either boil up some dried chickpeas till nice and soft, or rinse and drain some canned chickpeas. Mash well (but leave some lumps and texture)--by hand, blender, food processor, mortar and pestle, or whatever means necessary. Add to taste all of the following: tahini (Middle Eastern toasted sesame butter--you can substitute a good-quality natural peanut butter in a pinch); lemon juice; mashed raw garlic; fresh-ground pepper; extra-virgin olive oil; salt. Mix well; thin as needed with water, reserved bean juices, or more lemon juice till it's spreadable-to-dippable consistency. Optional: add some finely chopped parsley, cilantro, or green onions to taste.
• Homemade yogurt dip -- this is a super-mild version of an Indian raita, and also dead simple to make. Start with good-quality yogurt--whole milk is preferable, but lowfat will do. Peel, seed, and coarsely grate a big cucumber; let drain in a colander for awhile. Beat the yogurt with a fork to loosen it up, then mix in the cucumber plus a couple tablespoons of minced fresh mint; season to taste with ground cumin, paprika, and salt.
• Along with these two dips, I presented wedges of white and whole-wheat pita, plus a variety of cut-up fresh fruits and vegetables: cucumbers, zucchini, jicama, celery, carrots, papaya, canteloup, banana, grapes.
• Oh yeah--I did also have a tray of chocolate wafer cookies for those whose sweet tooths would accept no substitutes.

People totally inhaled all the hummus I brought, and also made significant dents in everything else. Cutting up all that produce before serving was a bit of a chore--I may well take the kitchen manager's suggestion next time and get some pre-cut produce. Or not. The pre-cut stuff is so much more expensive than just buying the whole items from the ethnic groceries.

Anyway, the first experiment was definitely a resounding success, and I'm already considering my menu for next month. How about a big bowl of my pico de gallo chopped salad madness, with a bunch of seasoned baked tortilla chips? Sounds good to moi!

"Eat More Veggies" recipe: roasted cauliflower

Roasted vegetables, when done right, may well be the salvation of reluctant vegetable eaters seeking to improve their nutrition. Just as with meats, the dry-heat method of roasting causes the target food item to give up some of its moisture content, resulting in a great concentration of flavors. It also browns the food, which not only ups the flavor content some more but also adds a nutty savory richness that is nigh irresistable. Naturally-sweet vegetables such as onions and red peppers become so sweet they're almost like veggie-candy. Sliced winter squashes roasted without any sugar whatsoever are so good, you'll never do that Thanksgiving candied sweet potato with marshmallow thing ever again. And when roasted, garlic becomes the vegetable equivalent of crack, it's so damn addictive.

Note, however, that qualifier I threw in at the very start: "when done right." Yes, it has been my sad fate to have experienced roasted vegetables done wrong, and let me tell you, it is not a pretty scene. The main offenders I have noticed here are 1) incorrect temperature and timing, producing wan, mushy veggies with no golden brown of caramelization; and 2) using way too much oil to lube up the veggies for their sojourn in the oven, resulting in food so slimy-greasy that even in my most fat-drenched eating days I found them irredeemably disgusting.

The first problem is easily solvable by correcting one's roasting technique. Despite those hopeful articles that surface every now and then about how to speed-roast at high temperatures (usually applied to poultry), roasting at its best is not a particularly speedy or high-heat process. Vegetables, thankfully, do roast up faster than meats, but you should still expect your panfuls of veg to spend a minimum of 30 minutes, and more like 45 or even longer, at no higher than 350 degrees F--and that's only after you've chopped them up into chunks to expose more surface area to the oven's heat.

The second problem is admittedly a little trickier. Even before I went on the health regimen, I found it was an extremely fine line between just enough oil and too much. It seemed to work best to toss the veggies in a big bowl with just a little oil plus whatever seasonings were desired, hopefully leaving any excess oil behind in the bowl when I transferred the veg to their roasting utensils. But even then, sometimes they'd still wind up a little oilier than I found palatable.

This is where those damnfool non-stick cooking sprays prove themselves to be more than just a dieter's convenience ingredient, and an actual boon to a cooking process. Because they are light sprays, with soy lecithin diluting the oil content, you can spray away as needed and not worry about overdosing on oil.

Admittedly, I haven't yet found an olive-oil-flavored spray that has good enough flavor to recommend itself, but if you want a good olive oil flavor on your roasted veggies, you can simply drizzle a little extra-virgin oil of one's choice on the veggies after they've finished roasting. You'd probably want to do it this way anyhow, as EVOO's lovely flavors would never survive the long heat of the roasting process.

While onions, bell peppers, garlic, and eggplant seem to be the veggies you most often find roasted on restaurant menus and such, there are many more that also make great roasting fodder. The main requirement seems to be that the vegetable be reasonably chunky, so that it can stand up to roasting without drying up to a cinder. Asparagus is mighty yummy roasted; so are beets. But one of my new faves in the roaster is cauliflower.

Now I adore cauliflower, but it never occurred to me to roast the stuff until I stumbled upon this monumentally long and enthusiastic topic on the subject over on eGullet. With that as inspiration, I began to experiment, and eventually came up with a method that pleased me and conformed to my food regimen. This method is so blissfully simple, I almost feel a bit of a fraud calling it a "recipe." Maybe I should just call it a technique. Whatever. It works, and it's pretty damn yummy. In fact, I've got a bowl of the stuff by my computer right now as I'm typing this, which I'm intermittently munching on as if they were potato chips--only much healthier.

So here's what I do:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Take one head of fresh, high-quality cauliflower and break it down into flowerettes, as uniform in size as you can manage. I find chunks somewhere around the size of an apricot, or maybe a hair larger, seem to work really well. Don't throw away the core or stem--trim them up a bit and cut them into chunks, a bit smaller than the flowerettes since the stem/core stuff is a little denser.
3. Take a couple of roasting pans or rimmed cookie sheets, and spray generously with cooking spray. Spread your cauliflower out evenly in the pans in a single layer. Give the vegetables a generous spray, sprinkle with salt and/or other spices as the spirit moves you, and then give the veggies in the pans a good stirring, to more evenly distribute the seasonings and to make sure they're well-coated with the cooking spray.
4. Slide the trays, uncovered, into the oven, and roast away. Once the cauliflower starts picking up a little browning, stir it around a couple of times more to expose unbrowned surfaces to the oven's heat.
5. When the veggies have gotten some nice browning all over, and are tender but still with a little "al dente" crunch to them, remove from the oven, and devour as desired. You'll notice the veggies will have lost a significant amount of volume due to moisture loss--but a whole head of cauliflower still makes a goodly pile of roasted product.

These are great to eat as is. They really are at their absolute best hot from the oven, but they're also quite nice at room temperature. And I haven't yet had opportunity to try this, but I bet roasted cauliflower would make an absolutely killer soup. Hmmmm ... I feel another cooking experiment coming on!

Alternatives to the dreaded leafy green salad

One of the many casualties of my years of action in the Dieting Wars was my former love of leafy green salads. I actually used to enjoy such salads, even as a kid, when it was often my job to make the big bowl o' salad that graced our dinner table almost every night. To be sure, that salad may have been a sop to my food-loving family's collective conscience--yeah, we were inhaling mass quantities of meat and potatoes at those same dinners, but the presence of the green stuff somehow made that alright. And we didn't gloop that salad up too much, either--my parents' approach to a vinaigrette dressing was decidedly light on the oil and heavy on the vinegar (we did 1:1 oil to vinegar, whereas the typical ratio in most cookbook vinaigrette recipes is more like 4:1 oil to vinegar).

But then entered the evil dieting mentality, and suddenly leafy green salads became the signature Dieter's Penance Food. And those wretched, wretched, WRETCHED bottled diet salad dressings! How the hell do they get away with selling that crap?!? I can only assume that many dieters, including myself for some years, suffered with that stuff only because it was better than the prospect of chowing down on those bales and bales of rabbit-food naked and unadorned (the rabbit-food, that is, not the persons doing the chowing down).

Oh, and the mental games--like the time-honored Abuse the Salad Bar game. How many inches high can you pile your dinner plate and still consider it "one dinner salad"? And then chewing one's way through that joyless pile of low-quality greenery, trying to convince oneself that it was satisfying.

Fortunately, there have been some improvements on the salad front since those days. One of the single biggest improvements can be summed up in a single word: mesclun. Yes, when that classic mix of gourmet salad greens made its leap from the salad courses of chichi restaurants and the produce bins of upscale greengrocers to the shelves of mainstream supermarkets, the world of salads took a great leap forward from the days of wedges of iceberg doused with flourescent-orange "french" dressing.

But my own personal aha moment was in some ways even more radical: as I perused the containers of salsa and pico de gallo at my local supermarket one day, it hit me: who said salads had to have any lettuce at all in them?

And thus I stumbled backwards into the long-lost world of chopped salads, which were apparently all the rage in the 1950s but somehow got eclipsed in favor of all those leafy lawn-clippings. Somehow I find the little chunks of tomato, cucumbers, peppers, and so on much more satisfying than the raw leafy greens--and yet all those chopped veggies are nearly as diet-friendly as a lettuce-based salad (provided you don't get freaky with the dressing). I eventually developed my own all-purpose template for chopped salad, into which I could fit any number of vegetables and seasonings depending on whim, what looked good at the market, and what in my vegetable bin was screaming to be used up before it became a biology experiment.

So here's the basic template, with all sorts of suggestions for variations.

• About four cups worth of mixed raw vegetables of your choice, cut into more-or-less same-sized dice. Veggies I've used include: tomatoes (I think meaty Romas work better than spherical slicer tomatoes for this purpose; your choice as to whether to remove or include the seeds and jellied bits); scallions (green and white parts); regular onions (the sweeter the better); cucumbers (I like English and pickling cucumbers better than regular cukes for this, especially because the former two usually don't need peeling); bell peppers, any color; radishes (I find the big Asian daikon radishes much handier for chopping purposes than the cute little red radishes); zucchini; tomatillos; and pretty much anything else that tastes nice raw and can be easily cubed
• Herbs and seasonings of your choice. You can mix and match, or go for a specific flavor profile--for instance, I often take my chopped salad in a Mexican direction by choosing cilantro, minced fresh jalapenos, and a clove or two of minced garlic as my seasonings. Or you can go Mediterranean with fresh basil and more garlic; or in an Asian direction with grated ginger root, cilantro, and more garlic. (Garlic is pretty much a constant with me.)
• A dressing of your choice. Yes, if you insist, you could just splash on some bottled dressing, diet or otherwise. But why do that, when there are so many varieties of oils, vinegars, citrus juices, and other ingredients available? Especially since you then have full control over how much oil, if any, goes into your salad? I like to make my dressings really tangy, with a ratio of 1:3 oil to acid. And again, I often pick a flavor theme--for instance, if I've decided on a Mexican thing with the jalapenos and cilantro, I'll go with lime juice instead of vinegar for the dressing. Don't forget copious grindings of fresh pepper, and a pinch or so of salt to taste.

Chop your veggies and seasonings, mix up your dressings, combine and toss, and voila! A nice big fresh salad with nary a leafy green thing in sight. And unlike leafy green salads, this concoction actually benefits from sitting around in its dressing overnight. Whereas a dressed leafy green salad would wilt into an unattractive slimy mass with such treatment, a chopped salad will spend the night swapping flavors around and mellowing. Plus the leftovers make great relishes to put on other foods.

Mind you, I have also made my peace, to a certain extent, with the leafy greens. In fact, I've been known to buy bags of those pre-mixed salad greens from the supermarket and munch on them straight from the bag instead of potato chips--something iceberg lettuce has never tempted me into doing. But those chopped salads--they have been a boon to my vegetable-eating ways. Give it a try yourselves, and see what you think.

"Eat your greens" -- Frank Zappa

All fresh vegetables are terrific sources of nutrients, but if I were forced to pick one subset of that food group that really excels on the nutritional front, it would have to be dark leafy greens. They contain major amounts of vitamins A (in the form of beta-carotene) and C, calcium, iron, folate, magnesium, lutein, and more. Studies have suggested they can help with all kinds of health issues from inflammation to cancers. And there's a whole spectrum of greens (pun intended) to choose from:  collards, kale, spinach, mustard greens, turnip greens, Swiss chard (which do come in a spectrum of colors beside greens), beet greens, dandelion greens ... and then there's the additional green wealths to be found at your local ethnic market.

However, most methods for cooking greens known to American cooks tend to undercut their health advantages. The classic Southern method, for instance, is to simmer such greens as collards and mustard greens with a big ol' ham hock for hours, until the meat is falling from the hock and the greens are soft and tender. While this is quite delicious, it also adds mass quantities of excess fat and sodium; the long heating does also destroy some of that wealth of nutrients. Some cooks have switched from ham hocks to smoked turkey parts, which cuts down the fat content considerably; however, the problems with sodium content and nutrient destruction remain.

Other cooks have abandoned the long slow simmer for either steaming, stirfrying, or sauteing the greens. However, while steaming and sauteing work great on the more tender greens like spinach and chard, they tend to leave sturdier greens like collards and kale rather tougher than I find enjoyable. Plus the majority of stirfried and sauteed greens recipes I've seen tend to resurrect the fat content problem. Yeah, if you go with unsaturated oils, it's at least a healthy fat, but it's still enough fat to totally capsize my daily fat allowance.

My solution? Keep the idea of simmering, though for a shorter time than the full-fledged ham hock routine, and with a minimum of fat, plus non-fat flavoring additives such as garlic, onions, chilies, tomatoes, and vinegars. Here's my basic template for cooking greens:

Ingredients:

• One big bunch of sturdy greens of your choice
• A couple cloves of garlic (as many as you like)
• A small onion, or a few shallots
• (Optional) A couple of dried red chilies
• Non-stick cooking spray
• About a half-cup or so of some kind of liquid (for example, beef, chicken, or vegetable broth, or soaking liquid from dried mushrooms, or wine, or whatever; plain water will do in a pinch)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• (Optional) A few shots of a condiment of your choice: balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, extra-virgin olive oil (only a teaspoon or two), hot sauce, etc.

Method:

1. Wash the greens thoroughly in a sinkful of cold water; remove and drain. Don't worry about getting the greens bone-dry. Separate stems from leaves. Slice the leaves into wide strips. I usually like to eat the stems, so I slice those thinly so that they'll cook faster.
2. Peel and mince the garlic. Peel, halve, and thinly slice the onion; or if using shallots, you don't have to halve them before slicing.
3. Spray the interior of a large wide-bottomed saucepan with cooking spray; place on medium heat. When the pan has heated up, add the onions/shallots and saute a few minutes. Add the garlic and saute awhile longer, until the onions are soft and even taking on some color.
4. Add the greens, and toss a few minutes to combine with the onions and garlic (it helps to do this with tongs or two big spoons, as if tossing a salad).
5. Add the broth or other liquid, plus the dried chilies if you're using them. You can also choose to add your condiment now if you like (especially if it's an acid like vinegar), or wait until the end (best for things like the olive oil, which would lose some of its flavor-umph if not added just at the end). Season lightly with salt and pepper to taste.
6. Turn to low and cover tightly. Allow to simmer until the greens are as tender as you like them--depending on your preferences, and the initial toughness of the greens, this could be as short as ten minutes or as long as an hour or more. Bear in mind, though, that the longer you heat the greens, the more nutrients you might be losing, so keep an eye on them so as to stop them when just done.
7. Remove the greens to a bowl and toss with your condiment of choice (if you haven't already added it). Don't throw out the cooking liquid--it's now full of flavor yummies! Either serve it on the side as "pot likker," or save it for another purpose.

Variations:

• For the cooking liquid, use a small can of whole peeled tomatoes, drained, plus a scant half-cup of the liquid from the can. Break the tomatoes up with the side of a spoon.
• Excessively bitter greens profit from a brief pre-blanching. Bring a large potful of water to a full rolling boil. Add the greens; simmer for only a couple of minutes, just until the vegetables' green color brightens, and then drain through a colander. Immediately douse with lots of cold water, or plunge into an ice-water bath, to halt the cooking process and fix that bright green color. Then proceed with the recipe above. (I don't bother doing this with mustard greens, as I enjoy their sharpness; but I do blanch dandelion greens as they're too bitter even for me.)
• Try other or additional flavor components--say, gingerroot with soy sauce; a couple anchovy fillets with tomatoes and olive oil; up the number of chilies, and add some salsa; saute a finely-diced mirepoix of celery and carrot along with the onions--or go Creole "trinity" with finely diced celery and bell pepper along with the onion ... the variations are endless.

Enjoy dousing yourself with all that chlorophyll goodness!

"Eat More Veggies" Recipe: Kick-Ass Ratatouille

I had always thought of myself as a good vegetable-eater. As a kid, I ate with gusto vegetables usually notorious as kiddie turnoffs: broccoli, spinach, even brussels sprouts (still love them thar little cabbages). And one of the first cooking implements I bought for my first grown-up living-on-my-own kitchen was a big rolled-steel wok so that I could do big veggie-laden stir-fries. I even flirted with vegetarianism in my 20s (didn't work--way too much of a carnivore I am).

But as the years rolled by, somehow my vegetable consumption began to fall off, until somewhere in my 40s I looked up and realized that I was going days without eating any plant-based product other than french fries and the occasional tomato slice on a burger. So, I went on a campaign to re-kickstart my veg consumption, a campaign only intensified by my recent jump back on the weight-loss bandwagon.

And almost immediately I ran into a sad fact: because most Western cuisines are so heavily focused on meat-as-entree and vegetable-as-side, vegetable recipes have all too often gotten short shrift in cookbooks. Even in many vegetarian cookbooks, entrees seem to be intensely focused on the protein ingredient, or else a starch such as whole grains and pasta. The number of entrees where the vegetable takes the starring role are relatively small, and ones consisting of nothing except (non-starchy) vegetables are even more rare.

There are some cookbooks out there that do put the focus squarely on the veg, such as The Victory Garden Cookbook (a fabulous reference) and Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking (the whole first chapter is page after page of marvelous vegetable dishes). But I soon realized that if I was going to get any further in my vegetable quest, I was going to have to start my own stockpile of killer veg entree recipes.

Ratatouille, the Provencal eggplant/tomato/zucchini stew, is of course an old standard in many cookbooks. I've been tinkering with my own take on ratatouille for literally years; but it really took off into another dimension when I started roasting some of the ingredients before combining them. The resulting dish is much richer in flavor, almost more of a caponata than a ratatouille. The use of cooking spray in this case is not just a dieter's convenience but almost a necessity--if you use olive oil for roasting all those veggies, the resulting dish runs the risk of winding up unpleasantly over-oily. If you really hate the cooking sprays or can't find one that isn't nasty, just use a light-flavored olive oil and apply with an extremely light hand (or get one of those oil misters that my buddy Kirk recommends so highly :-) ).

Note: all measurements are approximate--I'm of the "put in till it looks right" school of cooking.

Ingredients:

• One large "globe" eggplant
• Lemon juice--a tablespoon or so
• One big can whole peeled Roma tomatoes, including juice
• 3 to 5 small zucchini (smaller ones are better than larger ones)
• 2-3 bell peppers, your choice red or green
• One large onion
• Several cloves of garlic or to taste
• One bunch fresh basil
• One big bay leaf
• 1-3 dried red chilies (optional but recommended)
• Good olive oil--a tablespoon or so
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Kosher salt; black pepper (preferably fresh-ground)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg. F.
2. Peel the eggplant, trimming off the stem cap and blossom-end. Cut in large chunks; sprinkle with lemon juice to prevent it discoloring from air contact. Peel the onion and cut into chunks. Peel the garlic cloves. Halve the peppers, remove stems, seeds, and white membranes, and cut into thick strips. Trim the stem and blossom ends off the zucchini, and cut into big chunks. Pile all the vegetables into a big bowl, spray generously with the cooking spray, season lightly with salt and pepper, and toss the veggies until the spray and seasonings are well-distributed. Pick a whole bunch of leaves off the basil, roll clumps of leaves like little cigars, and slice thinly crosswise to get a nice chiffonade.
3. Take a couple of rimmed cookie sheets or sheet pans, and spray with cooking spray (if you want, you can line them with foil first for easy cleanup afterward). Distribute the veggies evenly on the pans, and slide them into the oven. Roast for about a half-hour, stirring occasionally, until the veggies take on some significant browning (the eggplant and zucchini won't caramelize all that much, but the onions and peppers will definitely caramelize a lot, and the garlic will get really mellow and start to melt into everything else).
4. Gently dump all the roasted vegetables into a colander set over a bowl to drain for a few minutes; reserve the drained-off juices, plus any juices that might have been left in the roasting pans.
5. Put a large pot over medium heat; put in a tablespoon of olive oil. When the hot oil's fragrance rises up out of the pot, add all the roasted veggies and toss gently to coat them with the hot oil (a little olive oil flavor goes a long way). Add the canful of tomatoes with their juices; break up the tomatoes with the side of your stirring implement. Also add in the juices from the roasted vegetables. Add the dried chilies, the bay leaf, and most but not all of the chiffonaded basil; adjust salt and pepper seasoning. Bring just barely up to a boil, then back the heat down to low, cover tightly and simmer until the flavors have had a chance to combine--might be as short as 15-20 minutes.
6. Tweak seasoning one last time if needed, and serve, with some of the reserved basil as garnish.

This is definitely one of those dishes that is even better the next day. It's excellent either hot, chilled, or at room temperature. You could additionally garnish this with some shreds of a nice parmesan if you wanted, but it's fine as-is. I often make a big vat of this stuff and basically live on it for the following several days--it's one of the few dishes I seem to never get tired of.